"4:30 Movie" is the newest collection from poet Donna Masini. Released May 29th by W. W. Norton, we're thrilled to offer you this preview.

In poems that are by turns intimate and wild, provocative and tender, award-winning poet Donna Masini explores personal loss, global violence, and the consolations of art. She brings her wit, grief, fury, and propulsive energy to bear on the preoccupations of our daily lives and our attempts to bargain with endings of every kind. Equal parts lament and praise, 4:30 Movie is fueled by despair and humor, governed by the ways in which movies enter our imaginations and frame our experiences. The movie theater becomes a presiding metaphor: part waiting room, part childhood, part underground depths where the self is a bit player, riding the subway with “its engine of extras.” Masini’s exquisite word play shows the mind wrestling ferociously to forestall grief, as if finding the right words might somehow allow us to extend our beautiful foreshortened run.

My sister's inside in a green gownand I'm here twisting dread into origamitissues, riot mind ticking wrong wrong.Is this what's been waitingall along? All of us carried off on a train,pressed to a window, charting the crazy migrationof cells, disaster oaringsteadily after us like Magito the babe. And time, grim monitor,screening each of us in our green toga.One day you're drinking your first martini,a minute later you're roamingsome hospital wing. (Why call it a wing?Why say origami when it's a useless rag?)Now none of it matters. My ironwill, impeccable timing.I think of a far-off war-torn townhiding my sister in her twin gown.

Originally appeared in Ploughshares. Reprinted with permission of the author.

It’s a kind of crime scene,as if the mind were a dimenovel, a scrim of need and semen,all cinder and siren, a dimprison where the miser dineson rinds of desire, and the sinner,sincere as denim, repeats Eden’sdemise—that luckless toss of dice.Yet here at the rim of this demesnea mitigating mise-en-scène:a close-up of her mother stirring rice,a glass of sparkling cider, a mincepie spliced in—not to rescind or mend:what mind denies mercies mine in the end.

Originally appeared in Poetry (November 2016). Reprinted with permission of the author.